Monday, November 23, 2015

Rong

Everything I know is wrong. Or at least everything that I thought I knew turns out to be held in question. Certain facts, the NFL season and its wiggly reality included, turn out to be less true than I thought they were. An example of this would be the absolute certainty I felt about Doctor Ben Carson and Donald "Forrest" Trump and their campaigns fading by the time autumn rolled around. If I were a betting man, I would have assumed that by now we would be picking at the metaphorical bones of these two GOP pretenders. How could we as a country, or at least part of a country, continue to support such a scary pair of potential leaders of the free world? How can the Carolina Panthers get through more than half a season without losing a game?
Like I said, I'm not a betting man. Which is why I would view the "fact" that there are more Mexicans leaving the United States than entering. This is not historically true, but rather a somewhat recent development. The Pew Research Center found that slightly more than one million Mexicans and their families, including American-born children, left the U.S. for Mexico from 2009 to 2014. During the same five years, eight hundred seventy thousand Mexicans came to the U.S., resulting in a net flow to Mexico of one hundred forty thousand non-citizens. This comes to us from a report by the Pew Research Center, a "non-partisan fact tank," that apparently spent some time collecting non-partisan facts about migration across our southern border. Facts that don't necessarily align with the idea of a porous sieve of a boundary between the United State and Mexico, and since 2012, rather than receiving a massive influx, our country seems to be having a bit of reflux when it comes to the old north-south thing. Three years ago, we sat about even, and it has been decreasing since then. The folks at Pew have given us plenty of reasons why all of this has come to pass, including changing job markets in both countries, but it still doesn't sound possible, does it? 
Especially when you listen to the guys driving the clown car. At this point, it seems like we need to build a wall to keep folks in rather than out. Or maybe Donald Gump has it all figured out. Changing employment patterns have opened up all kinds of opportunities for criminals and now it's just a simple matter of supply and demand. 
Or maybe he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Either way, I don't think I want the former owner of the New Jersey Generals to run my fantasy football league. That would be wrong. 

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